Apparatus

Scientists from MIT designed a microfluidic device to capture and count circulating plasma cells in small samples of blood. This technique can only be carried out through routine blood drawing, which is expected to reduce the pain of patients' myeloma testing.

Recently, the frontier drug INT230-6 showed good tumour killing effects in the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma in the single arm phase 1/2 open-label clinical trial IT-01 (NCT03058289), and the drug showed good responses whether injected inside the tumour alone or in combination with the CTLA-4 immune checkpoint inhibitor ipilimumab.

Data from a study of a cancer vaccine combined with a PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor has recently been released, and the treatment has increased the survival of patients with advanced colorectal cancer by more than three times, with some patients surviving for more than 22 months so far.

In a rural area of Britain, a team of 100 scientists and engineers first used low-cost technologies to develop mobile phones and the aviation industry. Later, these technologies were used to research robot arms, which can be specially used for minimally invasive surgery.

The US FDA has approved a new leukaemia drug, Olutasidenib, which has been shown to be effective and has a controlled safety profile, resulting in the complete disappearance of cancer cells in 35% of patients enrolled, with efficacy lasting up to 25.9 months.

A new study shows that for a common type of skin cancer, squamous cell carcinoma of the skin, immunotherapy before surgery resulted in the complete disappearance of tumours in 50.6% of patients and more than 90% in 12.7% of patients.

A study at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US demonstrated that Adagrasib alone and in combination with cetuximab delivered good results in patients with advanced colorectal cancer with KRAS G12C mutations, with 46% of subjects experiencing substantial tumour shrinkage and an efficacy rate of 100%.

Data from a study presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Medical Oncology in 2022 showed that lenvatinib in combination with Pembrolizumab could give 100% efficacy in this group of patients.

The US FDA has approved pemigatinib, the first targeted drug to date for patients with specific mutated blood tumours, and the results of the study show that the drug made tumours disappear completely in 79% of patients!

The FDA granted priority review status to Enhertu (DS-8201) for the treatment of patients with HR-positive, low HER2-expressing breast cancer, and Enhertu has enabled these patients to remain disease-free for an average of 10.1 months, with an average overall survival time of nearly two years. A decision on approval is expected to be made in the fourth quarter of this year.